Let me start off with this: I am a longtime fan of kung-fu movies, and Rudy Rogers has to be one of my favorite interviews ever.
More than halfway into our conversation, we branched off-topic to talk about Hollywood stars that Rogers had either met, trained with or heard about during his time in Los Angeles. It was fascinating to hear tidbits about stars whose movies I grew up watching. Bruce Lee was very good at what he did but actually learned some of his technique from Chuck Norris. Steven Seagal, on the other hand, was perhaps a little more glorified on the silver screen than in reality. But, it was Rogers’s stories about Norris — best-known as “Walker, Texas Ranger” — that captivated me so much that I forgot to ask about one of my all-time favorites, Jim Kelly.
Rogers knew Norris personally, often going to the star’s gym in Thousand Oaks. “Chuck Baby,” as Rogers and others called him, allowed his gym to become a Tuesday hot spot for every martial artist in the area — but, not how you would expect.
“Every Tuesday night, we would go there for what we called ‘Open Mat Forum,’” Rogers says. “You’d go there, and you’d do it like pickup basketball: If you win, you’d stay on the court. So, we would go there and fight. If you win, you’d stay on the mat. We don’t know who we’re going to fight.
“Everybody that was anybody used to go to Chuck’s school on Tuesday nights and do it,” he says. “After we’d do that, we would get buckets of chicken, eat chicken and hot peppers and drink beer. That’s how we used to do it, back in the day.”
Pickup karate! I don’t know if anyone actually does that anymore, but it sounds completely awesome. But, wait! There’s more:
“And, we used to develop kicks,” Rogers says. “The way we developed kicks was to the point that it’s like playing ‘HORSE.’ If I make a shot, you’ve got to make that exact same shot. Once you spell, ‘HORSE,’ you’re out. We used to do it with kicks, and we would spell out ‘KICK.’ If he makes a butterfly kick, and I miss it, I get a ‘K.’ If he does another kick and I miss that, I get an ‘I.’”
If Rogers himself hadn’t told me about this — if I had heard it pitched as an idea by someone else — then I wouldn’t have believed it. It does kind of sound like a plot device for a movie that Jean-Claude Van Damme would have starred in: American guy (with a unique accent) enters a series of pickup karate tournaments to pay off a mob debt, win back his love interest and, because it’s a Van Damme movie, find an excuse to do his famous split in front of a large crowd. This movie would have made a few million dollars in the 1980s.
I do, however, believe Rogers’s version is better, because it actually happened. As he puts it, people from all sorts of schools were way friendlier to each other back then, which is how pickup karate was considered widely acceptable. These days, you’d be hard-pressed to find people whose butts you can kick during the afternoon and have drinks with in the evening.
“That was what it was about, back in the day,” Rogers says. “More camaraderie, more love.”